dotSport complains to ICANN about other .sports

One of the companies that intends to apply for the .sport top-level domain has written to ICANN, begging that it does not approve any TLDs for individual sports.
dotSport’s Policy Advisory Committee, which appears to think it already has rights in the .sport string, said ICANN should respect “sport solidarity”.
In other words, please don’t allow .tennis or .golf to be approved.
The company wrote:

The PAC members reiterate our concern that ICANN may be prematurely entertaining a process that will allow proliferation of names in sub-categories or individual sports, which will lead to a number of detrimental effects

The detrimental effects, referenced in this letter last August, basically boil down to the potential for user confusion and the need for defensive registrations by sports teams and personalities.
You could apply the same arguments to pretty much any potential new TLD – what would .music mean for the .hiphop community?
The dotSport PAC is filled with high-level appointees from more than half a dozen sports federations, representing sports from basketball to rugby to archery, so its views are far from irrelevant.
Its position appears to be that the DNS hierarchy should be used for taxonomic purposes, at least when it comes to sports.
It’s an argument that was floated all the way back in the 2000 round of TLD applications, and probably before.
Purely from a marketing point of view, it seems like a self-defeating objective to mandate the use of www.example.hockey.sport when www.example.hockey is an option.
The main example of such a mandatory multi-level taxonomy, the old-style .us ccTLD, was a spectacular commercial failure.
Could it be that dotSport wants to be the registry for all .sports for the price of one? It certainly appears that way.

DotAsia wants lower ICANN fees

As its active base of .asia domain name registrations continues to plummet, the DotAsia Organization wants to reduce its ICANN fees by a third.
CEO Edmon Chung has written to ICANN’s Kurt Pritz, asking if the annual transaction fee it pays per domain can be reduced from $0.75 to $0.50.
“A lower fee would enable DotAsia to invest further into meaningful community projects as well as to extend the awareness and adoption of the .ASIA domain,” Chung wrote. “The suggested amendment would also bring the fees into line with other gTLDs.”
I don’t expect the proposed changes to be especially controversial, but they do highlight how tough it is to launch a new TLD.
The .asia TLD has proved to be a bit of a damp squib, especially since the early-mover speculators started jumping ship, so the company could probably use being thrown a bone.
After .asia’s landrush, the company grew its registration base to a peak of 243,000 in April 2009, according to HosterStats.com, but it currently stands at around 183,000.

UrbanBrain proposes first properly generic new gTLD

Japanese registry wannabe UrbanBrain will apply for .site under ICANN’s first round of new top-level domain applications.
Of all the registries to so far show their hands for the new TLD round, .site is probably the first that could properly be described as both new and “generic”.
UrbanBrain said the namespace will be targeted at “Internet users, hobbyists, and business owners”. A pretty generic constituency.
Also, the dotSiTE launch page currently contains a bullet-pointed list of three reasons why .site will indeed be as generic as they come.

The dotSiTE internet extension is full of possibilities.
* Optimize your SiTE with great keywords
* Some other text
* Another reason

All the other 100-odd new TLD applications to have been publicly disclosed to date address specific geographical, cultural or niche interest markets.
There are also two (for now) applications for .web, which I’m not counting as “new” gTLD applications because they’ve been on the table for over a decade.
UrbanBrain is affiliated with Japanese ISP Interlink, and registry-in-a-box venture RegistryASP.

Africa gets its third ICANN registrar

It’s been over eight years since ICANN held its public meeting in Accra, but only now has Ghana got its first accredited domain name registrar.
Ghana Dot Com becomes Africa’s third ICANN-approved registrar, the first new accreditation on the continent since 2007.
The first African registrar was Burundi’s AfriRegister, the second Kheweul.com of Senegal.
Ghana Dot Com appears to be the dba of Network Computer Systems Ltd, the ISP that already manages Ghana’s .gh ccTLD.
Its chairman, Nii Quaynor, is a former member of the ICANN board of directors, elected in 2000 and serving until 2003.
Ghana has about 23 million citizens and almost one million internet users, according to InternetWorldStats.com.

ICANN says no to Bulgarian ccTLD

Bulgaria can not have a localized-script version of its country-code domain .bg, because it looks too much like Brazil’s current ccTLD.
Bulgarian business daily Dnevnik is reporting that ICANN has turned down Bulgaria’s request for .бг, the Cyrillic translation of .bg, because it looks very much like .br.
Part of ICANN’s internationalized domain name fast-track process checks whether applied-for strings could be visually confusing. Clearly, this is one of them.
Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have already passed the test and have active IDN ccTLDs.
The Bulgarians are not giving up, however. Dnevnik reports that the country will most likely apply for .бгр instead.

Porn domain firm urges ICANN to ignore the haters

ICM Registry has asked ICANN to set aside the views of thousands of naysayers and approve the porn-only .xxx top-level domain as soon as possible.
The company has sent three documents to ICANN today, two of which set out ICM’s position in the same firm tone that has characterized its previous missives.
Basically: no more delays, your only option here is to get back into contract talks now.
I would say ICM is drawing a line in the sand, but ICM has drawn so many lines in the sand recently it’s beginning to look like a game of beach tic-tac-toe (which, visualizing it, is kinda appropriate).
The third document is a post-game summary of ICANN’s recently closed comment period on the .xxx application, which attracted record comments. That’s written by former ICANN public participation wonk Kieren McCarthy and is more measured in tone.
ICM president Stuart Lawley believes that the thousands of copy-paste comments from US-based anti-porn Christian groups can be safely ignored. I get the impression ICANN will probably agree.

The volume of comments on an entirely irrelevant issue – that is, the content of websites on the Internet – was one of the original reasons this process went off the rails. ICANN should not repeat its earlier mistakes and pander to those interests.

Given that a substantial number of comments came from the porn industry itself, notably the Free Speech Coalition, Lawley wrote that “debate about community support is no longer appropriate”.
ICM’s on shakier ground here than with the Christians. A TLD for a sponsored community that is unequivocally hated (NSFW) by a vocal part of that community can’t look good.
But the FSC, along with the Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, one of its members, “represent only a small fraction of the adult industry”, Lawley claimed.
Over 100,000 .xxx domains have been pre-registered over the last five years and several hundred of these people sent ICM’s copy-paste letter to ICANN. ICM says this indicates adult industry support, though I think that’s a less than watertight argument.
ICANN’s board will undoubtedly have a good old chinwag about their current predicament at their retreat this weekend, but they’re not due to make any decisions until the Brussels meeting a little over a month from now.

Root DNSSEC push delayed two weeks

The final rollout of DNSSEC to the internet’s root servers, a major security upgrade for the domain name system, has been pushed back two weeks to July 15.
ICANN’s DNS director Joe Abley said in an update on root-dnssec.org and in email to the dns-ops mailing list:

The schedule change is intended to allow ICANN and VeriSign an additional two weeks for further analysis of the DURZ rollout, to finalise testing and best ensure the secure, stable and resilient implementation of the root DNSSEC production processes and systems.

The Deliberately-Unvalidatable Root Zone is a way for the root operators to test how normal DNS resolution copes with fatter DNSSEC responses coming from the root, before worrying about issues concerning DNSSEC validation itself.
The DURZ has been cautiously rolled out over the last few months and has been operational across all 13 root servers since May 5.
The original plan called for the roots to become validatable following a key signing ceremony on July 1
The schedule change from ICANN also comes with a notice that the US government will be asking for public comment before the decision is made to properly sign the root.

Prior to 2010-07-15 the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) will issue a public notice announcing the publication of the joint ICANN-VeriSign testing and evaluation report as well as the intent to proceed with the final stage of DNSSEC deployment. As part of this notice the DoC will include a public review and comment period prior to taking any action.

I may be just a little forgetful, but I can’t remember hearing about this Commerce involvement before.
Still, DNSSEC is a big change, so there’s nothing wrong with more of the softly-softly approach.

ICANN switches off .mobi land-rush flipper

ICANN has terminated a domain name registrar that seems to have been made its business flipping land-rush domains, especially in .mobi.
Mobiline, doing business as DomainBonus.com, is an Israeli outfit that received its registrar accreditations about five years ago.
While it seems to have registered a very small number of domains, domainbonus.com did provide DNS for a few thousand dictionary .mobi domains, registered during the September 2006 land-rush.
A lot of these domains appeared to have been originally registered in the name of Mobiline’s owner, Alex Tesler.
Many have been since been flipped and archives of the DomainBonus front page show the firm was mainly preoccupied with aftermarket sales rather than fresh registrations.
ICANN has revoked its accreditation (pdf) for failure to pay its dues and escrow Whois data with Iron Mountain, as all registrars must.
ICANN is also switching off Western United Domains, a Spanish outfit that appears to have no web presence whatsoever, for the same reasons.

Crypto legend Diffie joins ICANN

Whitfield Diffie, one of the fathers of modern cryptography, has been hired by ICANN as its new vice president for information security and cryptography.
ICANN said Diffie, who was Sun Microsystems’ chief security officer until last November, will advise ICANN “in the design, development and implementation of security methods” for its networks.
Diffie, along with his colleague Martin Hellman, basically invented the first method of securely exchanging cryptographic keys over insecure networks, in the 1970s.
The coup comes at an appropriate time for ICANN, which intends to start signing the internet’s DNS root servers with DNSSEC security keys on July 1.
Diffie will no doubt be pushed front-and-center for the photo ops during the first signing ceremony.

Registrars responsible for proxy cybersquatters

Domain name registrars can be liable when their customers break the law, if those customers use a privacy service, according to new ICANN guidance.
The ICANN advisory clarifies the most recent Registrar Accreditation Agreement, and seems primarily pertinent to UDRP cases where the registrar refuses to cooperate with the arbitrator’s request for proper Whois records.
The advisory says:

a Registered Name Holder licensing the use of a domain is liable for harm caused by the wrongful use of the domain unless the Registered Name Holder promptly identifies the licensee to a party providing the Registered Name Holder with reasonable evidence of actionable harm

In other words, if a domain gets hit with a UDRP claim or trademark infringement lawsuit, as far as the RAA is concerned the proxy service is the legal registrant unless the registrar quickly hands over its customer’s details.
Law enforcement and intellectual property interests have been complaining about registrars refusing to do so for years, most recently in comments on ICANN’s Whois accuracy study.
ICANN offers a definition of the word “promptly” as “within five business days” and “reasonable evidence” as trademark ownership and evidence of infringement.
I don’t think this ICANN guidance will have much of an impact on privacy services offered by the big registrars, which generally seem quite happy to hand over customer identities on demand.
Instead, this looks like it could be the start of a broader ICANN crackdown on certain non-US registrars offering “bulletproof” registrations to cybersquatters and other ne’er-do-wells.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find the number of ICANN de-accreditations citing refusal to cooperate with UDRP claims increasing in future.
The new ICANN document is a draft, and you can comment on it here.